The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World

This book provides a rare glimpse into the secret history and evil machinations of the CIA as it mutated from its original form between 1946 up until the time the book was published in 1973 when it had become a cancerous blight within the government.It should not be surprising that most people never really understood the so called Vietnam War and they still don't. Even people in the American government like the Secretary Of Defense were completely confused and manipulated by the Agency as it's called.President Kennedy was somewhat inexperienced when he first entered office. JFK thought he could handle problems in the government in the same way he handled problems during his presidential campaign. He had an informal style at first where he would just ask a friend to take care of it. This caused JFK to disregard important checks and balances which had been set up to hopefully prevent the CIA from crossing the line from being just an intelligence agency into the realm of initiating clandestine military operations.The National Security Counsel was supposed to give direction to the CIA and then the Operations Coordination Board was supposed to verify that the CIA had done what they were told and only what they were told. But even before JFK got into office the Agency had taken many determined steps to undermine those controls.JFK's informal style opened the door even wider for the Agency to circumvent whatever controls may have still been effective to put some sort of limits on their 'fun and games'. Having an informal style with them was dangerous because they were experts at getting around all sorts of rules and laws.The Agency double crossed JFK during the Bay Of Pigs debacle. Publicly JFK took the blame for what happened but according to Fletcher it was the CIA who cancelled the air support that would have destroyed Fidel Castro's planes on the ground. As a result JFK's only options were to accept the blame or admit to the world that things were being done by the American military establishment that he wasn't even aware of. John Kennedy was a fast learner however and he stated that he would break the CIA up into a thousand tiny pieces. JFK was fed up with all of the Agency's fun and games.Something similar happened with the Gary Powers U2 spy plane that had to land in the Soviet Union. The evil Secret Team sabotaged the U2 to derail President Eisenhower's lifelong dream of holding a worldwide peace summit. Like JFK Ike accepted the blame publicly.Ike's only other option would have been to admit that the U2 flight was unauthorized and then fire Allan Dulles and the other leaders of the evil Secret Team. But Fletcher says Ike couldn't do this for various reasons even though Nikita Khrushchev probably realized that Eisenhower did not break his word and authorize the U2 mission.Ike's comments about the Military Industrial Complex which he made during his farewell address turned out to be very prophetic indeed.These examples provide the picture of an Agency that had become a law unto itself which reinterpreted whatever orders it was given to make those orders conform to their evil schemes. Fletcher provides many details in the book about how the Agency was able to circumvent laws and regulations and manipulate anyone and everyone in the government starting with the president. They did this mainly by abusing their control of secrecy but they used many other methods as well.Secret Team leader Allan Dulles wrote a book called 'The Craft of Intelligence'. The title of this book sort of indicates the very problem Fletcher Prouty explains in his book. Dulles viewed himself as a sort of artist or craftsman who could distort information and make it appear in any form he wanted. Strangely Fletcher refers to his close personal friendship with Allan Dulles in the acknowledgements at the beginning of the book but then spends the rest of the book portraying Dulles as a sort of Joseph Goebbels figure.Fletcher spends over 300 pages describing the metamorphosis which occurred with the CIA as it veered very far afield from what president Truman had intended when he created the Agency. Then towards the end of the book Fletcher finally reveals his shocking conclusions about what this massive abuse of power lead to.Fletcher felt that the assassination of president Kennedy was the single most pivotal event in modern American history as far as the changes that the assassination caused.Sadly as Fletcher points out the Vietnam War never really had any military objective. The theory was that if South Vietnam fell this would cause a domino effect and the dreaded communism monster would start gobbling up the entire world. Then when South Vietnam did fall with no domino effect the Secret Team published a group of documents called the Pentagon Papers. These documents deflected blame away from the CIA and said nobody listened to the CIA when they warned that the Vietnam situation was not winnable.But it wouldn't matter if anyone listened to the Secret Team anyway because they always lie.This book presents an American government in chaos during the Vietnam era. It was a government that had been high jacked by the evil Secret Team.After the Bay Of Pigs incident Fidel Castro apparently got fed up with the CIA and America in general. Castro turned to the Soviet Union instead. This lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was only in the last 10 years or so that people realized just how close the world came to an all out nuclear exchange at that time.This was a very dangerous game master craftsman Allan Dulles and his other liars were playing. They were like kids starting fires all over the place in a big field and then just sitting back and seeing which of those fires would become an inferno as Vietnam did.Also in recent years people have implicated Lyndon Johnson as being part of the conspiracy to assassination JFK. So LBJ was on the team also.I'm not sure if Fletcher ever really spells out what the true motivations of the Secret Team were but he hints at it. Probably the three main reasons that people engage in criminal activity are sex, money, and revenge. Usually when crimes are committed there's a money trail somewhere. And in the case of government military spending that's a very long trail.This is a serious book which contains many details about an approximately 25 year period that began after World War II. It is not light reading.On the Trail of the Assassins: One Man's Quest to Solve the Murder of President KennedyJFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. KennedyDavid Ferrie: Mafia Pilot, Participant in Anti-Castro Bioweapon Plot, Friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and Key to the JFK AssassinationThe Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJHit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK AssassinationDr. Mary's Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses Are Linked to Lee Harvey ... Assassination and Emerging Global EpidemicsTop Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government's UFO Cover-upWatch this documentary series on the internet. The hypocrites have pulled it off the market:The Men Who Killed KennedyThe Men Who Killed Kennedy DVD Series - Episode List1. "The Coup D'Etat" (25 October 1988)2. "The Forces Of Darkness" (25 October 1988)3. "The Cover-Up" (20 November 1991)4. "The Patsy" (21 November 1991)5. "The Witnesses" (21 November 1991)6. "The Truth Shall Set You Free" (1995)The Final Chapter episodes (internet only):7. "The Smoking Guns" (2003)8. "The Love Affair" (2003)9. "The Guilty Men" (2003)

Though this book is now over 40 years old, I found the information very relevant and 100% trustworthy from one of America's true Patriots. Colonel Prouty served his country for decades as a pilot and as an integral part of the Department of Defense and CIA. Though for nine years Colonel Prouty was the liason between the Air Force and the CIA's clandestine affairs, he is able to reveal confidential information that would typically be classified "Top Secret", because Colonel Prouty did not work for the CIA and therefore did not have to sign a confidentiality agreement with the nefarious CIA.What is fascinating about Colonel Prouty is that he was everywhere throughout his career. He watched world affairs as they unfolded, meeting the most influencial leaders of his time. From FDR, Stalin, Churchill, Ike and every general and admiral in our military. For the nine years from 1954 to 1963, he was involved as the go to guy for the military leaders and the president, including both Ike and JFK. In other words, Colonel Prouty writes from personal and direct experience.Now the meat of the book is about the creation and abuses of the 1947 created CIA. From the end of World War Two until the mid 1970's, the CIA abused its primary responsibility of intelligence gathering to literally unchecked clandestine and covert upheavels in every part of the world. The CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, created one coup d'etat after another. The reader will realize that from 1945 until the Marines reached the shores of Viet Nam in 1965, every piece of skulldruggery in Viet Nam was done by the CIA. The CIA had infiltrated the entire government, from the Department of Defense to the Department of State. Many people would be shocked to know that what passed as Defense activity was acually generals and admirals, wearing their uniforms and working for the CIA. Whether it was advising the President, subverting Ambassadors or lying to Congress, the CIA ruled and few knew what they were really doing. Colonel Prouty tells the stories accurately of every subversive, nefarious act the CIA was involved in. One example in particular stands out. It was Ike's goal at the end of his 2nd term as president to have a peace conference with the USSR, one to sign a peace treaty and end the cold war. In direct violation of the presidents specific instructions not to fly U-2 flights prior to the conference in June of 1960, the CIA flew the ill fated Gary Powers flight that guaranteed that the conference would go forth. This was a most important conference that could have brought nuclear peace accords decades before they were eventually signed. Dulles and his henchmen deliberately insured that Gary Powers not only violated the order not to fly these observations flights, they insured that it would be downed by sabotaging the flight and thus force Ike to either admit he knew or fire the bastards who embarrassed him. Ike chose to take responsibility and thus the peace talks were cancelled. There was also another flight in 1958 that was downed in the Soviet Union.Most Americans would be shocked to know the CIA has their own private air lines, Air America. This is no small air lines. Had Colonel Prouty written this book later, he could connect the CIA with the massive drug smuggling that has devastated American cities. They use the proceeds of this smuggling to finance their illicit involvement of other sovereign countries.Bottom line is this is an important book as is his 1993 JFK & Viet Nam. Colonel Prouty was a significant advisor to Oliver Stone and his masterpiece, JFK. I am currently finishing the rereading of said book. If you want to know who has controled our foreign policy (against the charter that created this monstrosity) since the mid 1940's, this is an excellent book to begin with. It is my personal opinion, having read many books on the CIA, that their main function is to serve the multi-national corportations and the bankers that exploit the less developed countries around the world and to insure that there will never be peace. There will not be a World War Three, because nuclear weapons would most likely be used and earth as we know it will cease to exist. Therefore, limited, no win conflicts will continually persist. Beginning with Korea, to Viet Nam, to Iraq to Afganistan. The irony is we are wasting our human resources and our treasury to bankrupt our country while both Russia and China sit back and spend zero (USSR & Afganistan is the exception) and develope the kind of infrastruture and consumer goods as well as education that we should be doing.Finally, the record of the CIA leaves a lot to be desired. There were many failures despite billions of dollars spent and the infiltration into every branch of our society, from education to media to think tanks to the military. Read this book and you will also discover the misadventure in Viet Nam that cost 58,000 plus American casualities, millions of Viet Namese, millions of service men who would never be the same after this debacle. Colonel Prouty explains this better than anyone I have yet to read. He predicted another debacle (Iraq & Afganistan) after the Viet Nam debacle. I believe Cononel Prouty passed away last decade, but he would not have been shocked by the rediculous misadventures in both of the above foremetioned countries. Think of the trillions of dollars and the bloodshed lost on a military misadventure that has no way of producing a positive outcome for the United States.Stephen CourtsAugust 7, 2012

All one has to do to see what is going on in our government is to read this book and marvel at the ability of the ST to undertake action with precision and skill. Mr. Prouty's authority comes from the fact that he was the man who was liaison between the CIA and the Pentagon at the end of the Eisenhower era and through the Kennedy era.The detailed telling of the Bay of Pigs follows closely with how the United States got caught up in the Vietnam War and how our problems have only metastasized since that time. The planning of covert actions is necessary, and Mr. Prouty details cases where this is needed, but it can also lead to a cabal to take power of life and death away from the elected officials, which portends poorly for whatever Democracy we supposedly have.While the detailing of information is quite important, this book does have a type of circuitous writing style that works well in conversation, but can lose readers in its style of asides. That does not diminish for one second the service Mr. Prouty does by making this book available to the American public. The contents of this book should be required reading for all members of Congress.